Sen. Ted Stevens Buried in Arlington
The AP reports:
ARLINGTON, Va -- ARLINGTON, Va. - As the roar of four F-22 fighter planes faded and a bugler sounded the final three notes of Taps, a red-tailed hawk hovered over the grave of former Sen. Ted Stevens on Tuesday afternoon at Arlington National Cemetery.
It was a fitting airborne tribute for the longtime Alaskan, a former pilot whose life and death were shaped by flying and who was buried Tuesday with full military honors.
The ceremony was a final military goodbye for Stevens, who served as a Republican senator from Alaska from 1968 to 2008. He died Aug. 9 at age 86 in a plane crash in Alaska that killed four others.
Stevens was the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history. But long before his 40-year career in the Senate and the high-profile corruption trial that brought his time there to an end, he was a war hero who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service as a pilot in China during World War II.
The 30-minute funeral ceremony marked that period of his life. It began with the U.S. Air Force Band playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while an eight-man honor guard escorted a horse-drawn caisson carrying the casket toward the gravesite.
Several hundred people filed down the hill behind the flag-draped casket to the gravesite, which sits across the river from the Lincoln Memorial. When the leaves fall from the trees in the winter, there will be a clear view of the Capitol to the northeast.
The chaplain of the Senate, the Rev. Barry Black, offered a prayer. Stevens, Black said, "had an amazing flair for the dramatic." His life brought to mind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "Psalm of Life," Black said.
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